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MOCHA: Multi-Objective Chebyshev Annealing for Agent Skill Optimization

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LLM agents organize behavior through skills - structured natural-language specifications governing how an agent reasons, retrieves, and responds. Unlike monolithic prompts, skills are multi-field artifacts subject to hard platform constraints: description fields are truncated for routing, instruction bodies are compacted via progressive disclosure, and co-resident skills compete for limited context windows. These constraints make skill optimization inherently multi-objective: a skill must simultaneously maximize task performance and satisfy platform limits. Yet existing prompt optimizers either ignore these trade-offs or collapse them into a weighted sum, missing Pareto-optimal variants in non-convex objective regions. We introduce MOCHA (Multi-Objective Chebyshev Annealing), which replaces single-objective selection with Chebyshev scalarization - covering the full Pareto front, including non-convex regions - combined with exponential annealing that transitions from exploration to exploitation. In our experiments across six diverse agent skills - where all methods share the same multi-objective mutation operator and baselines receive identical per-objective textual feedback - existing optimizers fail to improve the seed skill on 4 of 6 tasks: 1000 rollouts yield zero progress. MOCHA breaks through on every task, achieving 7.5% relative improvement in mean correctness over the strongest baseline (up to 14.9% on FEVER and 10.4% on TheoremQA) while discovering twice as many more Pareto-optimal skill variants.

Md Mehrab Tanjim, Jayakumar Subramanian, Xiang Chen, Branislav Kveton, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Anlan Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Somdeb Sarkhel, Sunav Choudhury• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Fact VerificationFEVER
Accuracy0.726
72
ReasoningGPQA
Accuracy63.6
37
Code DebuggingDebugBench
Average Accuracy66.6
11
Multi-hop Fact VerificationHOVER
Correctness66
5
STEM Question AnsweringTheoremQA
Correctness76.2
5
Multi-hop Question AnsweringHotpotQA
Correctness60
5
Multi-objective Agent Optimization6 Agent Skill Tasks
Correlation (Corr.)0.675
4
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